Doctors are rich.
Are you kidding?
How rich do you feel when you are 36 years old, just starting your first real doctor’s job, with half a million dollar worth of student loans at 7% interest rate with capitalization of interest accrued over your 7 years of residency training, you just moved for the job, have no house, no money in retirement accounts, and your car is 20 years old?
Time value of money is not on a doctor’s side with the delay in critical savings (retirement, college, home, etc.) and the prolongation of carrying high interest debt. Even with one of the highest starting physician income of 350k, the post-tax take home could be as little as 200k. Even if one puts $200k of post tax income towards his/her half million student debt, it will take a few years.
Let alone one needs to save for a house, save for retirement, raise a family, save for kids college, not to mention the catch up component of missing 14 years of 2 doubling time in investment (assuming 10% annualized return).
So when people say, the big debt is no problem since you’ve got big income, I wish they would do some math and put themselves in their doctors’ shoes.
Doctors are confident.
Myself and majority of my colleagues are some of the most insecure people I have ever met. We constantly are surrounded by the smartest, hardest working, most amazing peers, and frequently feel that we might have gotten to where we are (med school, residency, or a job) by luck or worse, by mistake. The impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome is prevalent, undermining our self worth and performance constantly. Too many of us believe that “I’m not as smart or as good as others might think I am.”
Doctors are healthy…
You may read the rest of the article on physician money digest.
great article!
Thank you, Jess.